As reported recently in The BFD, the two major Australian parties have colluded on new electoral rules clearly designed to freeze out minor parties. No such party is a greater target than the Liberal Democrats, who’ve previously been a gadfly in the ointment of the nanny-staters on both sides of the political aisle.
While supposed “libertarians” like the Reason Party’s Fiona Patten in Victoria are enabling the repressive nanny-state regime of “Dictator Dan” Andrews, the Liberal Democrats are standing up to the Covid dictators.
Especially their latest weapon of oppression: vaccine passports.
LibDem candidate and former Queensland premier Campbell Newman warns that Australia is headed for an ugly, segregated society.
It’s forgotten now but 2017 and 2019 were relatively bad flu seasons in Australia and there was zero discussion about the need for a flu vaccine passport. If we had introduced a flu vaccine passport then, yes, there would have been a small reduction in flu fatalities, but it’s also true there would be fewer fatalities if we banned motor vehicles. Both are absurd suggestions because it would have been self-evident that the collateral economic and societal damage was too high a price.
Despite the hysterical fear-mongering of the media-political class, Covid remains a vanishingly small threat to all but the oldest, sickest Australians.
Covid is serious, but these facts do not justify societal upheaval. They do not justify a Jim Crow-style Covid segregation and that is precisely what a Covid vaccine passport will do for many.
Worse, the pulpit-thumping of the vaxholes is almost entirely predicated on a false premise: that the unvaccinated are some kind of walking lepers, threatening the lives of the virtuous vaccinated. But that’s a ridiculous exaggeration: the unvaccinated are mostly a threat to no one but themselves. The vaccinated can still catch and transmit the virus; they’re just much less likely to end up in hospital and die.
Before we rush headlong into a two-tiered society, with perhaps one in five Australians condemned to perpetual lockdown and excluded from many aspects of life, let’s pause and think through the practicalities.
Workplaces will be torn apart; many of those who would prefer not to have a Covid vaccine will be forced to resign or undertake a medical procedure in which they are doing so only because their livelihood depends on it. That inevitably is going to create tension between employees and employers and between fellow employees. The same can be said for churches, sporting groups, social groups and so on.
What about kids’ birthday parties? When parents send an invitation, are they going to have to stipulate that only the vaccinated can attend? Will the host demand to see the vaccinated status of parents as they enter the party? It would convert a happy, innocent event into one with tension.
Vaccine passports will also serve only to perpetuate the catastrophist mindset of the Branch Covidians, who will see themselves as the virtuous Elect, surrounded by a sea of the unclean and dangerous.
That will be a very ugly Australia, and reprehensible for our leaders to legislate that outcome.
As they constantly do, Australia’s political class are yapping and whining in the dust of a world that is already leaving them behind.
Last weekend Prime Minister Boris Johnson backed down from implementing Covid vaccine passports in England. Johnson has been disappointing in many ways but this was a relief. The credit belongs to Tory backbenchers who in significant numbers voiced their concerns about legislating a two-tier society and the marginalisation of millions. The fact so few backbenchers in Australian parliaments have taken a similar stand is shameful.
The Australian
The Americans, French and Germans are protesting, massively and vociferously, against vaccine passports. The fact that so few Australians have done the same is a shameful indictment on us all. The world is abandoning what was never more than a flawed and dangerous policy. Eventually, Australia will perforce do the same.
The question is: how much damage will be done to our social fabric first?
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